AHA Members in Action

Case studies that showcase what members are doing to prevent violence in the workplace.

Active Shooter Protocol - King’s Daughters’ Hospital - ED Shooting Reveals Protocol Strengths and Areas for Improvement (September 2018)

INTEGRIS Health – Significant Threats: Domestic Violence and Forensic Patients consists of a Threat Assessment Guide, employee training, and procedures for enhanced security staffing to be prepared for domestic violence issues in the hospital. (July 2017)

CHRISTUS St. Vincent Regional Medical Center – Bridge to Safety is a domestic violence program that keeps patients safe as inpatients and follows them outside the hospital walls with phone check-ins and clinical case management to ensure that these patients know how to tap into available domestic violence resources in the community. (May 2017)

Minnesota Hospital Association Gap Analysis and Toolkit: The purpose of this gap analysis is to help healthcare facilities to implement best practices in order to prevent violence from patients to staff. The purpose is not to address disruptive behavior or staff to staff violence; those issues should be dealt with through other policies and/or procedures.

HealthSouth Violence Prevention White Paper: Recommendations and Resources 2015. The purpose of this document is to serve as a guide to help HealthSouth hospitals recognize the frequency and severity of workplace violence in health care in general, the risk of episodes of health care violence in each hospital specifically, and provide recommendations for how workplace violence prevention programs can be tailored to each hospital’s specific needs. This paper will also describe the required internal HealthSouth reporting mechanism for workplace violence events. To access this paper electronically, please go to HealthSouth’s intranet site/Corporate Services/Risk Management/Resources/Violence Prevention White Paper: Recommendations and Resources.

Florida Hospital's Active Shooter Plan Saves Lives, H&HN, August 22, 2016. Hospitals are not required to have an active shooter policy, but at Parrish Medical Center in Titusville, Fla., July 17, planning for such a situation prevented a seemingly random act of violence from becoming worse during an active shooter situation at the medical center.

“Keeping teens from being repeat victims of gunshot, knife wounds,” AHA News, August 18, 2016.  Mark Gestring, M.D., a trauma surgeon at the University of Rochester (N.Y.) Medical Center (URMC), was fed up seeing teenagers arrive at the trauma center to be treated for gunshot or knife wounds, only to return weeks or months later with more serious or fatal injuries. He was fed up, but he didn’t give up. He pulled together a multidisciplinary team from URMC to develop the Rochester Youth Violence Partnership (RYVP), a 10-year-old violence intervention program that is designed to identify at-risk youth immediately after they are brought to the hospital for a knife or gunshot wound and protect them from further injury.

Keeping Gun Violence Victims Out of the ED with Substance Abuse Treatment, H&HN, November 6, 2015. Harborview Medical Center in east Seattle proposes a three-pronged approach to addressing gun violence, which includes intervening during the first visit and assigning a caseworker to each victim. A recent study found that people admitted to the hospital following gun violence in King County were much likelier than others to end up rehospitalized, arrested or murdered.

Preventing Violence in the Hospital and Community, Hospitals in the Pursuit of Excellence Webinar, 2015. Violence is a serious safety issue for many communities and hospitals across the United States. Pamela Thompson, CEO of the American Organization of Nurse Executives, will introduce AONE's recently released toolkit for mitigating violence in the health care workplace and discuss the implications for leadership practice. Stephen Leff, co-director of the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia's Violence Prevention Initiative, will address violence prevention in schools, primary care sites, and the emergency department, focusing upon empirically supported prevention programs and hospital training in trauma-informed care. His presentation will illustrate how hospital-based violence prevention efforts can serve as a national model.